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There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies. And porch swings provided easy refuge … Remember that place? Perhaps from your childhood … That place is here again, in a new town called Celebration … that takes you back to that time of innocence … A place of caramel custard and cotton candy, secret forts and hopscotch on the streets … A whole new kind of lifestyle that’s not new at all – just lost for a while. That fellow who said you can’t go home again? He was wrong. Now you can come home.

Disney brochures, 1995

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense, but the past perfect.

Everything is nostalgia. Everyone wants to live in the past. The present has no style. The present is ugly. The present is gross … It’s part of the human condition to look to the past, because if you look to the future you have to look forward to your own death … So the past is where we all want to be.

Jonathan Ames, 2005

Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise. Obsolescence confers instant bygone status – no sooner is the fire engine retired than it becomes a precious relic. ‘Bring back proper kiosks’, yearned an English nostalgist. ‘Bring back trolley-buses … Bring back cars with starting handles.’ A Britain addicted to Victorian chivalry, neo-Gothic architecture, and the film Excalibur, surmised a 1981 critic, would ‘soon be appointing a Curator instead of a Prime Minister’. British curators are treasures in their own right, their heritage expertise exported worldwide, while at home Brideshead Revisited redux became Downton Abbey, today’s Edwardian triumph. Nostalgia ‘harks back to some rose-tinted past, of Marmite and The Magic Roundabout [1965–77], when kids played in the street, it was summer all year round, and Edrich was always 103 not out’. And before Britain’s imperial decline. ‘We’re going back to the past’, James Bond tells M in Skyfall, ‘where we have the advantage.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 1982

The study of memory teaches us that all historical sources are suffused by subjectivity right from the start.

Jan Vansina, 1980

Experience is doubly defective; we are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things. History supplies both these defects.

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, c. 1735

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Julian Barnes, 2011

History is protean. What it is, what people think it should be, and how it is told and heard vary with time, place, and person. Clio, the muse of history, was likened in America first to a social butterfly and then to a career woman, in the Soviet Union to a streetwalker or bureaucrat. Routed from her ivory tower, she is today an online dating site. Equally diverse are estimates of her age: one in three Britons think history dates from a moment ago, another third think her ten to twenty years old, the rest date her back to the birth of time. Americans often conflate history with today, terming yesterday antediluvian and tomorrow potentially hoary. ‘I got married when I was 25’, recalls a columnist; ‘that was in the Mesozoic era, and we had no end of trouble keeping the stegosaurus away from the wedding cake’. In line with the Los Angeles dictum that ‘history is five years old’, computer pioneer Steve Jobs sought to demolish his 1926 historic-register house. Jobs claimed ‘I could build something far more historically interesting.’

History extends and enriches, confirms and corrects memory through records and relics. It has come to comprise not only the annals of civilization but of aeons of so-called prehistory. The lack of written records does not mean that preliterates had no history nor does it preclude our inquiries into it. History is transmitted by vision and voice as well as by relics and texts. All manner of depictions – oral narratives, films, folkways, artworks – shed light on prehistoric as well as later times.

The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints … a map of its march … The ground is all memoranda and signatures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1850

Most of the marks that man has left on the face of the earth during his 2-million-year career as a litterbugging, meddlesome and occasionally artistic animal have one aspect in common: they are things, they are not deeds, ideas or words.

Glynn Isaac, 1971

When I was a lad, all this was open fields.

Young Cockney, in London’s Charing Cross Underground tunnel, 1982

Myriad traces of natural features and human artefacts long persist as tangible relics. Awareness of such relics conjoins what we know of the past through memory and history. For R. G. Collingwood, experiencing the tangible past was the essential entrée to history.

There is no better way of thinking oneself back into the Roman point of view than to look up on a map a well attested piece of Roman road and follow it for a few miles across country … Get a Roman road, or, for that matter, any road, under your feet, and you enter the spirit of the men who made it; you see the country through their eyes; you get into your bones a feeling of what they meant to do with the country, and how they meant to do it.

But no physical object or trace is a self-sufficient guide to bygone times; they light up the past only when thought to belong to it. ‘We cannot know how the flowers in the garden of Epicurus smelled, or how the mountain winds felt in Nietzsche’s hair. But we can recreate their thought [about] their original experience.’

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone.

George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1949

There is only the past. The future hasn’t come into being yet, and the present is a hairline thinner than the thinnest imaginable hair . . . Let us glory in having added more and more to the past.

Anthony Burgess, 1983

Someone asks a Greek cartoonist whether the country has a future. Well, he said, ‘we have a past. You can’t have everything.’

Patricia Storace, 1997

The miracle of life is cruelly circumscribed by birth and death. Of the immense aeons, the abyss of years before and after our own brief lives, we directly experience nothing. Consciousness that blesses humans with knowledge of a past also curses us with awareness of time’s awesome duration beyond our own evanescence. Why, asked Arthur Schopenhauer, should we lament our future non-existence any more than our absence from pre-natal eras?4 Some indeed do mourn both: viewing home movies filmed a few weeks before his birth, Vladimir Nabokov was appalled by the rich reality of this past he had not shared and where nobody had missed him. A brand-new empty baby carriage had ‘the smug, encroaching air of a coffin . . . as if, in the reverse order of things, his very bones had disintegrated’. Defying the prison of time present, he strove ‘to steal into realms that existed before I was conceived’.

‘These old offices of ours, such as the Badgeries, are much more important as rituals than they were as realities. Like old churches, they are nostalgic, photogenic, and give a sense of security. Centuries ago, the Co-Wardens held every badger in the land, and they still do, technically, but with no badgers involved any more.’

‘Is there no immediate badger whatever? An occasional glimpse of one would serve as a foundation, though I admit that invisibility is a higher and more splendid challenge.’

‘There is a token badger maintained by the Yeomen of Hertford Forest. It is a stuffed one, of course.’

‘I suppose they let us take it on ceremonial occasions.’

‘Not the actual, token badger, except on the death of the Lord Royal. Normally, you get a clip of artificial fur set in an osier staff. This is an emblem of the token. A symbolic dog-rose [is] presented to you annually by the Knights of Egham.’

‘In short, what is not symbolic is emblematic?’

‘Except when it is token. Then, it is stuffed.’

‘Which of these – token, symbolical, or emblematical – applies to our annual ritual of Easing the Badger?’

‘All three. The stuffed, or token, boar-badger is inserted into a symbolic den and then eased out with your symbolical gold spade. In this way, there is no need actually to disturb any living badger.’ Vinson represented the spirit of English history and institutions. Carrying his token spade, he stood for everything whose demise was beyond dispute.

Nigel Dennis, 1955

What if the past’s demise is indisputable? What if its forms and features are no more? Is there any way to bring them back? Can pasts that survive only in memory and memoir somehow be retrieved? History is full of efforts to recover bygone things and thoughts. Attempts to replace what has been lost are legion. Two types of retrieval are paramount. One is to restore what was once there; the other is to travel back to how things used to be.

Yearning for departed ancestors and bygone things takes two main routes, restoration and re-enactment. Both aim, as faithfully as possible, to reconstitute what has been recalled and recorded. Although the actual past remains unreachable, such simulacra may become laudable substitutes. Indeed, as the offspring of our own efforts, they may even feel superior to the original past they ostensibly replicate.

You don’t like the past? Then fiddle the books … How easy it is, as long as it’s just paper and fallible memory.

Robert Goddard, 1986

If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?

Van Wyck Brooks, 1918

The Byzantine Queen Helena [was] the most successful archaeologist in history. Whatever she looked for she promptly found hundreds of years after the event: the stable where Mary had given birth to Christ, the twelve stations of the cross, Calvary, the true cross, the nails, the lancet, the Holy Sepulchre and so on and on.

Yigael Yadin, quoted in Amos Elon, 1994

Societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.

Alfred North Whitehead, 1927

This chapter reviews why and how we change the past. We may be fully conscious, hazily cognizant, or wholly unaware of what impels us to revision. As shown in Chapters 10 and 11, efforts to save or retrieve the past are bound to alter it, no matter how much we strive to keep it as it was. Many seriously impact the past with no intent of doing so. Admirers of antiquity unwittingly mar its relics. Visitors who wear down the floor of Canterbury Cathedral seldom consider the cumulative impact of thousands of feet. Viewers whose breath and body heat imperil Lascaux’s prehistoric drawings ignore the corrosive effect of their presence.

We live in the age of speed, immediacy, and the instantaneous. The value of a bit of information is measured not in terms of its reliability but in terms of its rapidity … The very notion of duration appears to have become unbearable. Thus, the past seems to slip away, which in turn provokes the desire to bring it back into the present.

Henry Rousso, 1998

The life of the past, persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman … A lifetime’s study will not make accessible to us more than a fragment of our own ancestral past, let alone the aeons before our race was formed. But that fragment we must thoroughly possess and hand on.

A. S. Byatt, 1990

How is the past now seen? By what means and media is it accessed? Is it prized more or less than previously? Is it better or less well understood, clearer or more opaque? Is it more treasured or trashed, venerated or violated? Are the revisions that alter it felt desirable or deplorable? What has been expunged or invented, and why?

To generalize about global attitudes invites incredulity. If nothing else, this book has shown the overwhelming diversity of responses to what has happened, to what is inherited, to remnants and memories championed or cherished, regretted or resented. Indeed, the very facts of the past seem less and less consensual. ‘Not just polarized opinion but polarized knowledge’ spawns ‘wildly divergent accounts of the past’, observes a historian. ‘I have my past, and you have yours, and never the twain shall meet.’

The past is everywhere. All around us lie features with more or less familiar antecedents. Relics, histories, memories suffuse human experience. Most past traces ultimately perish, and all that remain are altered. But they are collectively enduring. Noticed or ignored, cherished or spurned, the past is omnipresent. ‘What is once done can never be undone … Everything remains forever’, wrote Václav Havel, ‘somewhere here’. The past is not simply what has been saved; it ‘lives and breathes … in every corner of the world’, adds a historian. A mass of memories and records, of relics and replicas, of monuments and memorabilia, sustains our being. We efface traces of tradition to assert our autonomy and expunge our errors, but the past inheres in all we do and think. Residues of bygone lives and locales ceaselessly enrich and inhibit our own. Awareness of things past comes less from fact finding than from feeling time’s impact on traits and traces, words and deeds of both our precursors and ourselves. To know we are ephemeral lessees of age-old hopes and dreams that have animated generations of endeavour secures our place – now to rejoice, now to regret – in the scheme of things.

Ever more of the past, from the exceptional to the ordinary, from remote antiquity to barely yesterday, from the collective to the personal, is nowadays filtered by self-conscious appropriation. Such all-embracing heritage is scarcely distinguishable from past totality. It includes not only what we like or admire but also what we fear or abominate. Besides its conscious legacies, the past’s manifold residues are embedded in our minds and muscles, our genes and genres de vie. Of passionate concern to all, the ‘goodly heritage’ of Psalm 16 becomes ‘the cuckoo in the historian’s nest’, purloining the progeny of Clio, the muse of history.

Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.

Russian proverb

The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation. Those who look upon it have survived it; they are its products and its victors.

Geoffrey Elton, 1967

We want to live in history, where all our ancestors and all our brethren live and die in common … But we also desire to escape from history …We want to be chained in history but we also want to be unlinked

Alan Liu, 2008

Is the past a burden and a trap? Or an anchor and a springboard?

Penelope Green, 2010

Why do we need the past? What do we want it for? What risks does regard for it entail? Does fondness for things past match the yearnings of nostalgia and time-travel fiction? How we engage with our heritage is more consequential, yet the dilemmas that ensue have much in common with those revealed in previous chapters. Here I survey attitudes towards the past in general, the benefits it supplies, the burdens it entails, and the traits that make it desirable or reprehensible.

We live in the present and see only what currently exists. What is to come is of obvious moment; we are programmed to care about the future we’ll inhabit. But why be concerned with things over and done with? Modernity threatens to strip the past of two hallowed values: enlightenment and empowerment. Yet bygone times command attention and affection as strongly as ever. An anthropologist finds ‘perduring belief in both the importance and knowability of the past’ from the traces it has left – human remains, documents, artefacts, psychic memories, genetic mutations.

Time truly works wonders. It sublimates wine; it sublimates fame; enriches and enlightens the mind; ripens cherries and young lips; festoons old ruins, and ivies old heads; … smooths, levels, glosses, softens, melts, and meliorates all things … All [is] the better for its antiquity, and the more to be revered … Time hoared the old mountains, and balded their old summits, and spread the old prairies, and built the old forests, and molded the old vales. It is Time that has worn glorious old channels for the glorious old rivers.

Herman Melville, 1849

‘I mean to go in for letting the workmen have the use of all the rooms, with liberty to smudge them as much as they like, and so at the end we shall have a sort of antique effect.’

‘They will be dirty.’

‘You may call it dirt; I call it Art.’

Robert Kerr, 1879

Arrest the actions of time, while preserving its effects.

Colin Jenner, 1994

Everything oxidizes over the years, including us. But viewed from the right perspective, the marks of passing time have a beauty of their own.

Costanza Algranti, designer, Livorno, 2010

It is my absolute favorite thing to combine beautiful people with old, rusty, dirty settings.

Cassy Bartch, photographer, Alaska, 2009

When the humanists opened their eyes to the glories of Greece and Rome, what they saw, beyond classical texts, were worn and mutilated remnants of antique architecture and sculpture. They admired these eroded fragments, not initially for their ruinous condition, but because their state of decay made them both intensely human and ripe for repair and embellishment. The classical past came to life most vividly in fresh re-creations. The time-worn fragments demanded to be to made whole again, in celebratory verse or in actual restoration. Not only did these tattered remnants inspire passion for the forms and ideas of antiquity, they enabled humanists to become co-creators, sculptors by restoring and replicating, architects by restaging in prime locales, poets and painters by portraying their trajectory from wholeness to ruin to resurrection. ‘Fragmentariness was the most crucial fact about rediscovered sculpture’, writes Leonard Barkan of the newly found (1506) Laocoön.

How does the look of age come? … Does it come of itself, unobserved, unrecorded, unmeasured? or do you woo it and set baits and traps for it, and watch it like the dawning brownness of a meerschaum pipe, and make it fast, when it appears, … and give thanks to it daily? Or do you forbid it and fight it and resist it, and yet feel it settling and deepening about you, as irresistible as fate?

Henry James, 1871

O envious age! Thou dost destroy all things with the relentless teeth of old age, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror and saw the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had been twice ravished.

Leonardo da Vinci, 1508

I hope I die before I get old

Pete Townshend, 1965

That doesn’t mean they’re old, dear. Prunes are supposed to be wrinkled.

‘Dennis the Menace’, 1984

Awareness of things past derives from two distinct but often conjoined traits: antiquity and decay. Antiquity involves cognizance of historical change, decay of biological or material change. The benefits and burdens of the past discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 mainly concerned age in its historical sense, though often couched in metaphors of youth and old age. This and the next chapter explore views about age in its biological sense.

Marks of age are quite distinct from manifestations of antiquity, such as historical residues and revivals or retro styles. Things seem biologically aged owing to erosion or accretion, altered colours or forms. Ageing is a worn chair, a wrinkled face, a corroded tin, an ivy-covered or mildewed wall; it is a house with sagging eaves, flaking paint, furnishings faded by time and use. Whatever their historical pedigree, objects that are weathered, decayed, or bear the marks of long use look aged and thus seem to stem from the past.

The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath.

José Saramago, 2010

The way of history is not that of a billiard ball, which, once hit, moves in a straight line, but like drifting clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, diverted here by a shadow, there by a knot of bystanders or by a striking facade, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew of nor meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is considerable deviation.

Robert Musil, 1930

What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

William Ralph Inge, 1929

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

William Maxwell, 1980

The past is in myriad ways indispensable. ‘What we know, do not know, can and cannot know, what we should and should not believe about the past’, concludes a philosopher of history, vitally affects ‘our temporal orientation, personal identity’, and present conduct. Previous chapters explored the range of our needs and desires; this section surveys the mechanisms that acquaint us with the past, as a precondition of meeting those needs.

Wanting the past is shadowed by doubts about whether its merits outweigh its flaws. The valued attributes that distinguish the past from the present often come at a heavy cost. The next three chapters survey the disputes that perennially embroil partisans of tradition versus innovation, youth versus age. Chapter 4 discusses the rival repute of past and present in four different epochs. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with pastness in terms of life-cycle analogies, first surveying well-nigh universal preferences for the new and young, then contrarian fondness for the old, the worn, and the decayed.

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.